Dos and Dont’s – Holidays Season Email Marketing

It’s time to shop ya’ll. Christmas and New Years is peak time to reach out to your customers by email. Several factors affect the performance of your email campaigns. Here’s a quick recap of everything that matters.

Preparation

The most important step to take is planning your holiday season’s email marketing calendar. You need to strategize and evaluate needs of your stores. It is essential you review data on your customer base and plan for various shopping behaviors and customer groups. In a 2017 survey done in the US & Canada market with 200 consumers and 100 retailers, 67% said they use data to improve engagement and sales in their email marketing. Shopper history data can give you insights on what kind.

Planned changes in e-mail marketing strategies according to retailers in North America between 2016 and 2018. Statista.

Ask your team questions like – Do you have a target customer group this year ? Are we promoting any specific products ? Have a calendar to mark all the emails planned to be sent so you are aware of content creation timeline and needs.

Timing & Frequency of emails

Don’t go overboard. Space your emails out, if you send 4 newsletters a day, chances of the emails going to spam are pretty high. The second concern is of the customer ignoring your content due to the sheer volume of emails coming from your store. Do not send more than 1 newsletter a day to get proper engagement from customer.

Send your newsletters at a time your customer base is active online. You can use Google Analytics to understand the most popular time of day and the day of the week for your store. The chances of the customer engaging with your emails is much higher at a time they are usually online.

For example, a fashion store with the target audience of age group 18-30 years, should not send emails on a Friday night. The probability of such audience opening the emails is very low. Therefore, be smart and optimize sending time. In order to be effective, emails need to be sent at the time/day convenient to a specific customer base. Read more about best days and time to send email marketing.

Personalization

Don’t let your newsletters get mixed up in the crowd. “In 2016, personalized messages had an 18.8% open rate, compared to a 13.1% open rate for non-personalized e-mail. Click rates also fared better for personalized vs. non-personalized messages, at 2.1 and 1.9 percent respectively.”

Using personalized information helps to build trust and improves the relationship with the customer. You can start with the basics like including customer’s name in the subject line or inside the email. But other info like last purchase date, order number, reward points left, number of orders is even better. It automatically grabs the client’s attention and provoke them to notice and open the emails while also engage with the content inside the email.

We recommend to include dynamic info based on shopping behavior and purchase history like personal product recommendations catered specifically per customer . “As the Salesforce 2017 holiday data indicated, AI-powered product recommendations were used for only a small fraction of online shoppers, yet it drove a significant amount of holiday sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.” Latest researches show that customers and especially millennial actually expect brands to send them personalized messages and don’t find it offensive.

Segmentation

Segmentation is key to success of your email marketing strategy. Segmenting your customers will help you send out emails that reach customers at the right time and leading to high engagement and conversion. Customer segmentation can be applied to both the list of customers you are targeting, and to the content inside the email. For example, you can segment the content by using dynamic tags, personalized coupons, number of orders, reward points, etc.

Another good practice would be to segment clients based on purchase history. For example, customers who spent more on your store (high spenders) can be provided with lower coupon code vs first time shopper.

Frequent customers can be provided with product recommendations of best sellers from their favorite categories etc. Customers who made a purchase during Christmas last year can be targeted specially as well since it shows their proclivity towards Christmas shopping. Segmentation like this can also help with increasing deliverability in general, improve your email domain reputation. Bottom line, these high quality emails drive more sales. Period. “It was found that 56.67 percent of responding online retailers in 2017 found segmentation as a tactic one of the most successful in driving email marketing conversions.”

Most effective e-mail tactics in driving conversions according to online retailers as of June 2016. Statista.

Summary

A good combination of the above factors will make for a well rounded approach this Christmas. Personalization and Segmentation have been going strong when it comes to email marketing all throughout the year, it’s about time you board this train. Lastly, the most important hack is knowing each store is unique. There is no set formula, only probability and numbers that can help you work in the right direction. The rest is up to you to analyze and understand the pulse of your customer list. Several trends will come and go (hint-hint: emojis in subject line) , it is essential you keep an eye out and focus on constant improvement.